Electronic content may be displayed in various locations on different display devices that function as digital signage. For example, different display devices may be located throughout a store, a car dealership showroom, a shopping mall, in storefront windows, among other locations. The display devices may be intended to display electronic content so that the display devices function as digital signage. In some instances, it is desirable to display the same electronic content across multiple display devices.
For instance, a car dealership may own multiple different showrooms in different locations with display devices in each location. The car dealership may desire to display the same electronic content on each of the display devices in all of the showrooms, even in different locations. The total number of display devices may number in the hundreds or even the thousands and the locations may be spread across an entire country or even span across multiple countries. Additionally, the car dealership may desire to display the same content at specific times across the multiple locations.
In a further complication of the problem, 80-90 percent of the electronic content may be the same for each display device; however, 10-20 percent of the electronic content may not be the same for each display device and may be region or location-specific content. It may be desirable to define the common content to be shown on all the display devices, and only specify the local exceptions as needed.
Traditionally, each individual element (or individual digital assets) of the electronic content (e.g., picture, image, video, etc.) is individually scheduled to appear on specific display devices at specific times. One technical problem is that this approach of individually scheduling each individual element of the content to appear on specific display devices at specific times does not scale well when there are hundreds or thousands of elements and hundreds or thousands of display devices. For this approach, an n-to-m mapping is needed where n is the number of elements and m is the number of display devices. For example, assuming there are 50 elements to show on 100 display devices, then 5000 individual assignments need to be performed in order to schedule all 50 elements across all 100 display devices.
One specific approach to individually scheduling each individual element of the content for each display is to tag each element with a tag matching the specific display device and then to add timing information to properly schedule the element so that the element is displayed at the desired time. In addition to being a cumbersome and manually intensive process, this specific approach does not scale well, as mentioned above. Furthermore, in this specific approach it is hard to specify and maintain an order for the elements. Also, because the order may be resolved at runtime, it is difficult to know with certainty that the assets will actually play as desired.
A further issue with this specific approach is that each assignment is unique and is not re-usable. If a number of individual elements are scheduled to form the electronic content or an experience, then the experience is not easily duplicated to share on a new set of display devices. To share the electronic content on a new set of display devices, the elements have to be assigned one by one again to each new display device.